Throughout our lives we are exposed to many needs and issues that present themselves. Some of those needs we are able to quickly release, other issues may truly concern us, and a few may deeply move us. This is especially true of this era with the growing popularity of documentary/investigative-type shows and the Internet. We are blitzed daily by compelling information about homelessness, violence, evangelism, AIDS, education, addictions, political involvement, and poverty, to name just a few. All of these needs are noble, all are important, and all are timely. But the human heart can only carry so much need, and over time it has to release those things it was not created to pursue.
Then there are the needs or situations that we have never been able to fully dismiss. They haunt us. Everything seems to surface these needs and situations. We have “eyes and ears” for these things that others don’t seem to have. We may find ourselves pulled to a particular topic area in bookstores. It’s the subject of a news story where we turn the volume up and ask everyone to hush. It’s the article we read two, three, maybe four times. I have been studying the subject of calling, not because calling has been work-related or I can’t get any clarity on who I am, but rather out of deep desire and curiosity. Albert Einstein said, “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” There is a reason you are interested in certain things and not others. Your curiosity is linked to your truest desires.
Pay attention to your strength of desire. Your heart is revealing something important.
Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson said,
“To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”
I have met many people who have lost their souls, their hearts, because they have been living a script someone else handed them. So many people have lived by the preferences of others because they have ignored their own hearts. Think about the man who goes into law practice because his father told him that’s what he should do and then finds it hard to get up each morning to go to work and comes home angry each evening. Or what about the woman who works in a corporate office each day simply because she was told that this is what an intelligent, gifted woman should do to advance in life and be happy. But the truth is, for the past ten years she has been unhappy and has felt mostly loss as she has ignored her own desires.
What you were created to do is what you most want to do. Your calling in life comes in the form of your strongest desire, your truest preference, and is often initially experienced as your deepest curiosity. Your truest desire becomes compelling.
